Tonight at midnight, in the half-light of the Audubon Tea Room, the tuxedoed men of the Bunch Club will formally offer their arms to wives, daughters and goddaughters turned out in their best evening dress. To the applause of 600 guests, they will promenade grandly around the floor as the orchestra plays "The Bunch Club Waltz," the Carnival highlight for one of the city's older African-American social clubs.

And a little more healing oxygen will seep back into the life of a beleaguered city.

This didn't happen last year.

To be sure, there was a Mardi Gras last year: happy, defiant, even a little heroic. It was mounted with no little hardship by local, mostly white parading krewes with a critical mass of suburban members damaged, but not wiped out, by Hurricane Katrina. Zulu, the premier black parading organization, found enough members on its roster of 600 to fashion a parade.

But the city's smaller African-American social clubs, with only a few dozen members each, mostly missed last year.

Now, 17 months after Katrina scattered them, destroyed their homes and all but destroyed their businesses, many more black middle-class New Orleanians have regrouped this year to resume their celebration of Carnival.

Not only the Bunch, but other groups as well: the Vikings, the Plantation Revelers, the Townsmen, the Original Illinois Club, the Young Men Illinois Club and others.

They occupy different social niches. But collectively, they are the city's black doctors and lawyers, its merchants, small-business owners, contractors, skilled tradesmen, property managers and post office supervisors -- its middle class once thickly spread across Gentilly and eastern New Orleans.

"The middle class was devastated," said Keith Weldon Medley, a writer and Bunch member. "Their clients were gone; patients gone; people who represented accounts receivable -- gone. These are all people who are now living accidental futures."

Back in the weave

They were exiled for months by Katrina. Some still are, driving or flying into New Orleans from Baton Rouge or Houston. Many of those who have come back are in unfinished houses or FEMA trailers. Few seem to have their old lives back.

But part of their labor is reclaiming their fun -- as Vikings charter member Bobby Ellsworth puts it, restoring the "weave" of personal relationships that forms much of New Orleans' connective tissue, informally but crucially binding the city by neighborhood, by family, by generation and friendship.

At a traditional Vikings "practice party" last weekend, an old acquaintance spotted Ellsworth for the first time since the storm. "He said, 'Man, I haven't seen you in more than a year. I gotta kiss you,' " enveloping Ellsworth in a bear hug with a joshing kiss on the cheek.

"These cultural events are vital to the city," Medley said. "When we put on our dance Friday, we're making a statement that New Orleans' traditions are alive and will continue into the rest of the century."

Undocumented history

For decades, African-American social clubs were all but off the radar for white New Orleanians. In a segregated city they met in black lodge halls or union halls. Their events were not covered in the white-dominated media. Medley, whose Bunch Club was founded in 1917, said he can find no written record of that club's events before stories in the Louisiana Weekly of the 1920s.

Katrina has added its own damage to that thin historical record. Members of some clubs report that old scrapbooks, group photos and dance programs dissolved in the same living room muck that claimed family wedding albums and diplomas.

Recovery hasn't been easy. Near Christmas of 2005, five months after Katrina, Vikings President Clarence Ancar could gather only eight members for a meeting. Six months after that, the Plantation Revelers could summon only about a dozen, member Alvin Turner said.

Not only were members scattered, so were the guests who each month looked forward to an invitation, Ancar said.

There was no hope of launching a celebration that first year after the storm, said Ancar and others.

Now the clubs are in the thick of their season. Last week the Young Men Illinois staged its first post-Katrina ball, its members in formal wear introducing debutante daughters to the public.

And last weekend the more casual Plantation Revelers met in a rental hall in eastern New Orleans, having forsworn their usual location, the wrecked St. Bernard Civic Center, where ordinarily 20 members would entertain 800 guests, member David Cantrell said.

And this weekend besides the Bunch, Ellsworth's 24 Vikings will host 600 guests at the Jefferson-Orleans in Metairie.

Having "practiced" at last week's warm-up party -- "mostly it's to make sure your elbow is in good shape," Ellsworth said -- the Vikings, their partners and their guests will be in tuxedos and ball gowns. The formality belies the circumstances of their founding 54 years ago at The Hot Spot, a vanished 7th Ward bar at North Prieur and Lapeyrouse streets for the carpenters and small businessmen who later would see each other again at Mass at Corpus Christi or Epiphany Catholic churches.

Making adjustments

But if the Carnival soirees are back, they are not yet all back in full health.

The Plantation Revelers -- "the name has to do with we're off the plantation and having a good time," said Cantrell -- met this year in a smaller hall, without live music and with catered, rather than home-cooked, food.

Other clubs are having to adjust as well.

For years, Medley said, members of the Bunch, assembling for the evening's grand procession with their partners, donned white gloves, red satin capes and plumed marching band hats. They wore club medallions engraved with the club's motto -- "Pays, Bienfiance, Famille": "Country, Good Fellowship, Family."

So many capes, hats and gloves are gone in the storm that the club has forsworn that custom this year, Medley said.

But they will be replaced next year.

And there will be a next year, club members say, for their Carnival tradition lives again.

"We've missed our friends," said the Vikings' Ancar. "That we can entertain them satisfies us. We missed that. Getting back together -- that's going to be a real homecoming.